The rising prevalence of youths who have smart phones makes location sharing apps like this a great tool for parents letting their kids be more independent. That's just one use of this app that I can think of. Several other commenters here have already pointed out great uses: caravans, search and rescue coverage, etc. so I will not try to add on to that. Overall, it's well made and deserves to become a staple tool for live location sharing.
Well, point taken (I'm a heavy shell-user myself).
However there's a range of tasks where a GUI file manager is just the right tool for the job. I maintain OSX should have a proper file manager, regardless how much Apple wants the Filesystem metaphor to die.
With some work I got it into a more readable state: http://cl.ly/KZxs. After the first barrage of buzz words and hype I found it really hard to keep reading at all.
To be honest, I'm having difficulty understanding what I should be seeing when I "pinch," as you say. In Chrome it makes all text/images larger, including the banners. This is standard in Chrome. In Safari 6 I zoom into the page, the actual page, as in the banners disappear. This is standard for Safari 6.
Please elaborate on what exactly should be happening, otherwise it's just people spending 2 minutes discovering functionality in their browser, not your site.
Have you looked at the Code Year track? The last challenge before the start of the Python course and following a flurry of jQuery challenges is a project aimed at demonstrating programming prowess attained up until that point [1]. It seems like the perfect place to start to "build a portfolio" as you say. It's also at a great point in the track since people should be very comfortable with a stack like html/css, js, jQuery.
It's easy for us experienced folk to say "forget that rubbish, build a portfolio" but that argument quickly falls apart in the context of teaching people who have no idea what programming even is and who want to explore it more. As much as I would love to have sat down at the age of 14, looked at a computer, and started pumping out concurrent, distributed Ruby web servers, it doesn't happen that way. You really do have to start from the basics, poking and prodding, until you can actually build anything worthwhile.
I haven't and that is great to know. I guess that was part of my question: How does Codecademy attack the balance that hiring companies want to see when it comes to technical knowledge and experience building real things.
As well intentioned as I imagine the author to be, there's really nothing here that you couldn't learn from older documentation, as several commentors have pointed out. A more interesting example would have been to calculate running time of some function vs. it's recursive version. Essentially, something besides an extended 'hello world'.
